Lawrence Bommer

PATHETIC PAYBACK Some plays all but ambush their audience–dramatic Trojan horses that promise laughs and deliver the opposite. Aesthetically treacherous, they lure innocent onlookers into enjoying an unthreatening lifestyle comedy, then turn the tables and unleash some very intended consequences. “Some plays” in this case is the chillingly cynical  Angry Fags, a disturbing modern-day revenge tragedy….

THE OTHER CHICAGO FIRE No question, this 20-year-old tragedy is not as sexy a Chicago calamity as either the historic three-day blaze of 1871 or this year’s centennial of the foundering of the Eastland steamer. A natural event with unnatural results, the heat wave of 1995 is more like the 1979 blizzard that defeated Mayor…

A PORTABLE COMMUNE SELF-DESTRUCTS This weird show is a strange but stirring entry in Steppenwolf’s three-play “Garage Rep” series: Red Tape Theatre’s  The Walk  Across America for Mother Earth  is a very 60s-style, interactive, feel-good “mixed bag,” theatrics on steroids. This groovy “do your own thing” combo of  Hair,  Lord of the Flies, and  Marat/Sade  both mocks and celebrates agit-prop radicalism and…

THE SCOTTISH TRAGEDY: NEVER SAY DIE You can’t kill the Scottish tragedy. Written 408 years after  Macbeth,  Dunsinane  is the Shakespeare sequel we never knew we needed. Now on tour at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier, this co-production by the National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Shakespeare Theater brings new wounds to some very different combat. David Greig’s…

OPT OUT OF  A PLOT THAT’S NOT The real “sweeter option” is to miss this altogether. A new work written by company member John Henry Roberts and hyper-directed by Marti Lyons, The Sweeter Option is also Strawdog Theatre Company’s 100th production. Well, purely by default, it provides a good excuse to praise the previous ninety-nine. Alas,…

FAME BY DAY, A CLOSET AT NIGHT This retrospective 2010 drama by British playwright Dylan Costello is so well meant, you want to forgive it for its good intentions. But–well–don’t stop the presses! This tale of closeted homosexuals who defy the studios to pursue their love in 1949 Hollywood  (and end up divided but not conquered),…

DEFINITIVE DATES ON INDEPENDENCE DAY In this 95-minute one-act called Four, half the “dialogue” seems unspoken but not unfelt. The audience is literally just along for the ride. Christopher Shinn (who wrote the troubled Teddy Ferrara, recently performed at Goodman Theatre) depicts two strategic couples–one straight, mixed-race, mixed-age; one gay, mixed-race, mixed-age–in Hartford, Connecticut on…

A PASSION PLAY FROM PLACID Like a baby on a breast, Lifeline Theatre thrives on adaptations of “coming of age” novels. As with  many memory-rich predecessors, Jessica Wright Buha’s clear and present stage version of One Came Home, Amy Timberlake’s “heroine journey” best-seller from 2013, hangs on seminal turning points. Buha efficiently establishes clear relationships among…

SHRINK, ENLARGE THYSELF! Christopher Hampton’s dramas are marvels of complicated construction, starting in the past and finding us fast. A retelling of the “creation myth” of psychoanalysis, this variegated 2002 offering is compelling in its Chicago premiere by Idle Muse Theatre Company. The Talking Cure contrasts Sigmund Freud (Vincent Mahler) and Carl Jung (Patrick Doolin)….

DARK DOINGS IN POSTWAR PARIS Now in an appropriately driven local premiere by Chicago Opera Theater, Tobias Picker’s two-and-a-half hour opera from 2001 delivers a bleak harvest of shame. The illicit lovers in Emile Zola’s scandalous 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, based on a true tale of working-class lovers in Paris who murder the woman’s husband…

A VICTORIAN TALE FOR TODAY Jackie Robinson was not, it seems, the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Long before 1946, Moses Fleetwood Walker was a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings and later for the Syracuse Stars. He was an invaluable athlete circa 1884, so much so that local racists became fans…

DOOMSDAY THERAPY The peculiar premise behind Matt Lyle’s lifestyle comedy, now running in a moderately intriguing Midwest premiere by The Ruckus, is that for some folks the end of the world will be a character-building, equalizing opportunity–a second chance for losers who didn’t earn a first one. If it doesn’t kill them, adversity brings friends…

ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle’s resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That’s very right: This four-year-old is a work in progress who alters as we hear his parents’ very different reactions to a boy who may well want to become…

VOGUEING IT AT VERSAILLES The putative appeal of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette is that everyone likes to watch a train wreck. Now exfoliating in Steppenwolf’s upper stage in a dispensable Chicago premiere, this 2012 sendup of celebrity worship and its fickle reversals is a fitting showcase in costly Steppenwolf style. A splendid mirror runway reflects…

BEING ALIVE’”AND SONDHEIM Way overdue and instantly invaluable, Porchlight Music Theatre’s Sondheim on Sondheim delivers the inside look on Broadway’s brightest. Rich with new arrangements for old favorites and the stories behind the songs, this multi-layered revue, a Chicago premiere, employs video, projections and a flawless eight-member ensemble to present lyricist/composer Stephen Sondheim from the…

GAGA FOR GANESHA Now in residence at Victory Gardens Theater, the newly minted Rasaka Theatre Company is in hot pursuit of more diversity on Chicago stages. Their mission: to share the tales of South Asian-Americans, adding helpful variations on the music of humanity. Anna C. Bahow’s earnest Midwest premiere of Madhuri Shekar’s romantic drama dabbles…

VERY FINE FRENZIES Winter can be wonderful in Chicago’”well, if you’re safe inside the Auditorium Theatre for the ten performances of Unique Voices. The Joffrey Ballet’s three-work showcase of dynamically contrasted works by three inimitable choreographers is more than just a feat for feet. So outwardly diverse yet internally consistent are these very individual works,…

IT’S ALL FOR THE WORST…IN A GOOD WAY With his typical topsy-turvy perversity, Charles Francis Addams might have  been happy had the 2009  musical inspired by his sardonic New Yorker cartoons  ended up as a “work in regress.” But happily for us, the opposite has occurred to  this show about  a ghoulish misfit clan haunting a Queen Anne brownstone in…

ELEVATING THE SUBWAY There’s a very specific springboard for Redlined: A Chicago Lyric, 75 minutes of slam protest poetry: It’s the elevated transit line that runs through the Windy City’s North and South Sides. The latest evocation from Chicago Slam Works (“igniting poetry through performance”) is J.W. Basilo’s taut staging of a free-form literary collage…